Social engineering is the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. While similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery for information gathering or computer system access and in most cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the victim.

I found this video on youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfQrDK9YHasThis is an inspirational video and its pretty educational too. I would have turned off the camera the second they asked me to because I wouldn't have known that they weren't telling me the truth when they said "its an offence to film the police". See the look of certainty on the womans face when she was telling him it was an offence. I'm guessing that she believed what she was saying and since the other guy called it in, he obviously believed it too.

Everything about that police encounter seems so familiar. I've only had a handful of police encounters throughout my life and the majority of the time the police were pretty respectful to me so its not my police encounters that this video reminds me of. It must be some of the numerous encounters with petty authority figures I've had throughout my life. In fact I think it was mainly school where I learned about petty authority figures. In school the consequences aren't real but the tactics the teachers use to control the students are actually pretty similar to the tactics real authority figures use. I watch that show "Real Interrogations" from time to time and its always the same, the interrogator tries to get the suspect to admit to crimes because if they had evidence to convict the suspect, they wouldn't need to interrogate them in the first place. I've observed teachers and police use this same tactic. One example is when I robbed the schools MP3 player and when we were in assembly the principle said "we know who took the MP3 player so can the student who took it report to the principles office and he will be dealt with more leniently". I half believed that he knew it was but I didn't own up to it and that was the last I ever heard of it. He was bluffing.

Another situation me and a couple of friends were at a factory that me and another guy had broken into weeks earlier and we were planning on going in to rob the battery powered factory car like I'd done before but this time the factory owner came up to the gates before we got in and he was a friendly old man and gave us a heads up that he'd called the police so we left and on our way down the road an unmarked police car (in Ireland this is common) pulls up beside us and 2 cops get out and 1 of them does the talking. He asks us our names and were we're going etc. then he asks us "were you up at that factory a few minutes ago?" and I reply "no" then he says "alright, get the fuck outta here" and they get back in the car and drive off. I suspected that he knew we were at the factory and cuz of that I almost admitted to being there and considering my finger prints were all over that factory car I probably woulda got charged with various crimes (we were drunk that night and went on a bit of a mad one) and locked up if I had admitted. I know this is all common knowledge to you but I was 15 at the time and since nobody ever taught me (back then I didn't use the internet) it was only from these experiences that I learned the tactics of authority figures.

Can you share your educational stories in which you learned about the tactics used by authority figures.